The internet continues to swing back and forth regarding how guilty they feel Steven Avery is in the case of Teresa Halbach’s murder. It all started back in December when Netflix released Making A Murderer, a 10-part documentary on the case that pointed out several red flags in the prosecution’s case and some shady behavior by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, who Avery has accused of framing him.
Since then, we’ve heard more evidence against Avery and more evidence that he may be innocent. Most recently, there have been some pretty damning statements made by Steven’s ex-fiance Jodi Stachowski that paint Steven as violent and the documentary as “a bunch of lies.” And now another blow to the #FreeStevenAvery side: a hole found in a vial of Steven Avery’s blood that seemed to back up his claims he was framed may have a much less sinister explanation. Via OnMilwaukee:
The prison nurse who originally drew Steven Avery’s blood and put it into the vial featured prominently and dramatically in the Netflix “Making a Murderer” documentary “would testify that she was the one who put the hole in the vacutainer tube at issue,” a court document obtained by OnMilwaukee says.
The nurse, Marlene Kraintz, wasn’t called to testify because the prosecution didn’t think the defense had raised the blood hole theory at trial strongly enough to warrant rebuttal. This runs in contrast to the Netflix documentary, which presents the defense finding the hole in the Avery blood vial as a virtual “eureka” moment to advance its framing theory.
The OnMilwaukee article goes on to consult two experts including “the chair of the committee that writes the industry standards on drawing blood samples” who confirmed that the rubber stopper gets pierced when blood is put into the vial.
Still unanswered: why the evidence sticker sealing the box containing Steven Avery’s blood was broken. How Steven Avery’s blood (which prosecutors alleged came from a cut on his finger) ended up in the RAV4 while his fingerprints did not. And Avery’s trial lawyer Dean Strang recently noted in a radio interview (11 minutes in) that there were “small spatters of blood around [the vial] which would have been from extracting a syringe from the vial.”
So, once again, we’ve got a little bit of evidence pointing one direction, and a little bit of evidence pointing another. Still, every time one of these ‘eureka moments’ from the documentary gets shot down by a third party that did some basic investigation, it really makes you wonder what else was misrepresented that slanted our view one way or another.
(via OnMilwaukee, h/t BroBible)